The U.S. Education Department shared personal information on hundreds of student loan applicants with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) across a five-year period that began after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, newspapers reported Friday.

Under the program, called Project Strikeback, the Education Department, which collects information from 14 million applications for federal student aid each year, received names from the FBI and checked them against its student aid database, and then forwarded information to the FBI.

The agencies said the program had been closed, but neither of them would say whether any investigations had resulted, The New York Times reported.

The program was created 10 days after the September 11 attacks, according a USA Today report citing documents from the Education Department's Office of the Inspector General, which investigates cases of fraud, waste, and abuse in federal education programs, including student loans.

The issue was first reported on Thursday by a graduate student, Laura McGann, at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, as part of a reporting project which focused on national security and civil liberties.

Information collected on federal financial aid applications includes names, addresses, Social Security numbers, incomes and, for some students, information on parents' incomes and educational backgrounds. Generally, only United States citizens and permanent residents are eligible to apply for federal student financial aid.

John Miller, assistant director of the FBI, said in a statement that "during the September 11 investigation and continually since, much of the intelligence has indicated that terrorists have exploited programs involving student visas and financial aid. In some student loan frauds, identity theft has been a factor."

He said the Education Department was asked to "run names of subjects already material to counterterrorism investigations" to look for evidence of student loan fraud or identity theft, and that was not a sweeping program, in that it had involved only a few hundred names.

Source: Xinhua